This Is Who We Are
by OhGreat
Summary: Locked away and out of sight in a mental institution, the Fire Nation tries to forget the sadistic princess it once worshiped like a god. But Azula, even with the chains tying her down, will not be forgotten. This is Azula's story.


This Is Who We Are

Chapter 1

Take It Like a Solider

-

-

-

She was in a mental institution for reasons they called "unspeakable", but Azula, despite her location, was no idiot. She knew why she was there. She could still see her keepers from the straightjacket that bound her body, and it wasn't until three days in that her intense glare broke the doctors' sense of security. They blind folded her. Azula was, after all, insane.

There wasn't much the doctors could do about the talking, however. Most of the faculty wouldn't gag royal blood, even if Azula was an ex-princess. Half of the medical staff had worked in the palace, and at one time or another, at least a third had worked for Azula personally. No one liked her. They could never forget how deep and permanent their fear ran. Therefore, Azula remained un-gagged. It was a problem from day one. It would always be a problem.

It was hard to get close to Azula, initially. As exhausted as she was, as unstable and broken, she was still a prodigy. She could still firebend. Hands tied and eyes covered, she could warm her body to temperatures so high she herself could not be touched. Flames seeped from her tongue and teeth like sarcasm, whipping forth like a soldier's weapon. She had become a human bomb. For two weeks, she was iced and drugged and isolated; no one could get near her.

Until Doctor Tseng, who Azula would murder one day, declared a solution. A very illegal, unauthorized solution. It came in the form of a pill, small and green, mysterious, questionable. Tseng hadn't tested it. He could never morally test it. And so Azula the ex-princess became Azula the guinea pig, unwilling and stubborn as any test subject could be. Zuko didn't know; most of the faculty planned to keep it that way. It didn't really matter, so long as Azula was controlled and docile. The pill was designed to affect a person's immune system for a short period of time, and the aftermath was a limited halt of bending skills. It had been in development for three years under Ozai's orders and for his eventual use, yet his defeat left the project in a frozen limbo.

No one was more in charge of the mental health facility than Doctor Tseng. So no one objected.

Without any form of terror in his face, Tseng, who hated Azula out of misogynistic disgust, walked into Azula's cell and kicked his foot into her skull. He shoved the pill down her throat, stepped back, and told the associate doctor in charge to call him in an hour.

Azula retched and coughed and spat; she gagged and screamed, cursing the doctor and promising his eventual demise. Tseng told her to shut up, and then left.

The green pill, which the medical staff had started to call the clover, didn't do anything. At first.

A male nurse watched with interest, waiting to see the affects of the clover. But all he saw was Azula go from pale to very pale, her back hunched over, her breathing heavy.

She was a symphony of side affects, sweat falling from her face like she was sobbing. She looked deathly.

"Her immune system has to be continuously low," Tseng explained, watching the progress of his own experiment manifest before his corrupted eyes.

And so that was how it worked. Azula stopped bending. Her body heat went down only to spring back up in a ferocious fever, her body trapped in a spasm of coughs and headaches. She became manageable. Yet they still never took the straightjacket off.

"This is nothing," Azula snarled in-between the times when her body was nearly healed and when they fed her the clover again. Illness became her only constant.

Azula the victim was a hard thing to stomach. Most of the staff had trouble feeling sorry for the woman that nearly destroyed the world. Azula could not digest food; it slid down her throat only to fight its way back up again, urged on by her insistent coughing and rocky stomach. Now living on watered down soup and the little sugar they could get into her water, Azula finally looked like she belonged in an insane asylum.

Her sick state got so bad, a visiting professor demanded they remove the straightjacket for at least part of the day. No one could call it humanitarian, but the professor insisted. They had to. At least then she control where she vomited; she could feed herself; she could really be left in isolation. She would be something no one had to deal with. She would be forgotten. Maybe she'd die. The staff could not forget Azula's own sadism six months before she was institutionalized, but they started to notice they were mirroring her cruelty.

It was funny for a while, but even Azula could not stand her state of health forever. The staff was in a continuous cycle of keeping her healthy enough to stay alive yet sick enough to be controlled. She became more work than necessary and thus harbored the dual resentment of the entire institution.

It was exactly what Azula wanted. It was all part of her plan.

"I think I remember you," Azula said to a doctor one day, her voice as sweet as a cake with too much frosting. "Yes, Jai, of course. You worked for my father when I was a child," she announced, but the doctor paid no attention to her. He checked her pulse, checked her heart rate, decided she'd live for another day, and then he left. As he walked out of her cell, sweat dripped from his forehead.

"How did she know?" Jai murmured, terrified, to a nurse who was bringing food to another patient. "She's blindfolded; I didn't say a word."

He quit the next day.

Doctors like Jai were Azula's least favorite, the kind that wouldn't play her games. She liked her keepers one way: pale and shaking.

It didn't matter that she was sick. Azula's first piece of prey called himself Gigi. Even with her blindfold on, Azula knew he was poor and miserable. He was a better listener than a talker, and when he monitored the halls each morning as a part of his guard-ly duties, Azula could tell his footpace quickened when near her cell. Days before she ever talked to him, Azula knew he was as bendable as fire.

"I don't think I know you, guard," Azula said, as regal as an ex-royal in a straightjacket could be. "What's your name?"

Gigi said nothing. He was eighteen and engaged. He wanted to live to see his wedding.

"Guard? No reply? That's fine. It doesn't matter. I already know your name anyway," she smiled, and the blindfold only made it worse. "Is Gigi a sad nickname or were your parents hoping for a girl?"

And that's how it happened everyday. The more Azula talked, the angrier Gigi became, until his silent state of grace started to crack. He didn't know he was a pawn on Azula's board of chess; in fact, as the days passed and all Azula did was talk, he started to think that was all she could do. Surely a fire bending prodigy like Azula would have displayed her skill by now, would've broken out, would've run. But here she was. Bound and blinded, and if he could get it through, gagged. But still, no one would dare gag her. No one wanted to get close enough.

Two months in and Azula didn't seem crazy. She seemed wrong, but not crazy. Yet in the Fire Nation, there really wasn't a difference.

But even so, Gigi was suspicious. Azula's baiting. It didn't seem right. Three days later, he requested a second guard on duty. It was the same recipe, though. And it kept working.

"Sakai. You don't have to say anything. I heard you have children. How old are they?" Azula asked the new guard, pretending to watch him through her black blindfold.

It didn't take long before three guards were on duty, watching over Azula like dogs, one unsure and the other unsure and other unsure. They were doubting and apprehensive; scared enough to quit their jobs but knowing they needed the money. Watching Azula meant a new house, better clothes, better paychecks.

It wasn't until Tseng started showing up daily that the pieces began working together. The only problem was, Azula could not find out his name. Tseng made sure she never did; his subordinates could only call him doctor. She listened and waited, but the other three guards had caught on, and neither would utter the other's name in her presence. Azula knew one would slip, but three months in an asylum and names were always the first thing to go. It didn't matter. She didn't need his name.

Tseng cultivated his hatred for Azula that perhaps had extended from a hatred of Ozai, but his real motivation was never understood. He locked a glare with Azula's face, and before either of them knew it, a month had passed.

Azula knew fear transcended Tseng's malicious embodiment. He was never afraid to set foot in her cell, never terrified of shoving that pill down her throat. There were days his anger festered beyond gentlemanly management, but Azula wanted this. She was a proverbial technician, she could find the buttons and knew how to work them, push them. Each person had a different set, and for the last few months she had worked at unearthing Tseng's, as well as the three guards. Azula could see that each had a boiling point, and that an explosion was accumulating. She waited for the trigger.

It was raining outside when Tseng came to deposit the clover into Azula's esophagus. He stopped, stared into the dark of Azula's cell. He snickered.

Then the laugh vanished, just like the flash of pity had. "I think I'm bored." He sorted through the keys in one quick swoop, unlocking Azula's cell and throwing the door open with a loud clash of metal.

Azula smirked. In the last month, she had heard the start and end of the good doctor's name, always masked in the dark whispers of dark conversations. _Ts…Eng…_ It sounded like a snake.

The name rolled off Azula's lips in one quick, unsettling snap, "Hello, _Tseng_." Her blindfold couldn't stop her from seeing the doctor's frozen body.

"You think you're so smart, child, but there's nothing impressive about trash," Tseng snarled back, standing over his patient's body and staring down into the filth he believed she had become.

Azula's body was bone and muscle. She had been in the institution for five months; it would take a lot longer than that to break down sixteen years of training. Even her continuous illness, a roadblock if there ever was one, could not destroy her body the way it should have. She was weak and damaged, but she had the soul and body of a royal mercenary.

This was her plan.

This was her plan.

This was her plan.

Tseng called the three guards into Azula's cell. It happened like this:

_There is blood, glares, and snarls, all lost in the poetic design of pure, scorching hatred, composure gone, hum-an-it-y gone; it is all the same to Azula, she was never fully human in the first place, never really had a heart, never really cared. She is a serpent. She is a monster. When Tseng grabs her by the back of the neck, Azula doesn't flinch, doesn't shout. She doesn't know how to do those things. All she knows how to do is take it like a soldier. Tseng, the doctor, the good doctor, crushes her head into the brick wall behind them, again, again, again. The blindfold falls off. It's hard to see the blood against the red of the wall, but it's there, seeping, sickly. He throws her to the floor, and it's an open invitation to the other three men in the room. They kick, they beat, they swear, they say "what do ya have to say now, princess?!" It's like their brains never developed, like they don't know the proper way to torture someone. Azula, in all her sadism, tells them they're doing it wrong. _

_She can taste the blood in her mouth. She spits. They spit. _

_It's a fury of fists and fear, all three guards still apprehensive, still worried Azula might get out. She's a genius, she's a liar. It is a terrifying combination. _

_Tseng takes out a knife, he's going to carve away the girl in front of him, carve his initials into the back of her neck. He lunges._

_It is all part of the plan. _

Like a trigger, Azula pushed forward, angling her body just enough so that the knife tore through part of the straightjacket. Like a true tactician, she utilized the position of the men, their stances off, and rushed her body against all three. She ripped through the straightjacket's tattered fabric, and the use of her arms and her hands was such a foreign concept that Azula could only use her legs to kick and bruise with.

There was blood everywhere. She couldn't see what she was doing as rage filled her mind, white in its essence, blocking her primordial sense of rationality.

She killed the guards one by one, grabbing their lives and ripping them in half.

Azula, standing above a pile of bodies, turned to Tseng, the once fearless man cowering in a corner. She took three steps forward and ripped his throat out.

It was all part of the plan, she thought as she tiredly slumped into a wall, breathing heavily, nauseated and exhausted. She needed three guards watching her cell so no one would think to send back up if things got bad. She needed to bait them. She needed to compromise their confidence, their manliness; she needed to break them. Azula had never thrown Tseng into the equation. He was simply a stroke of good luck. Azula knew three angry guards and a bitter doctor would eventually accumulate a sense of anger and frustration, a need to kill their captive. Get them in one place. No back up. No one knows.

Azula needed this, largely, because she had to rest afterwards. Her sick, tired body had become her worst enemy. Her control over everything was gone; her body had betrayed her. She could not count on herself anymore.

Exhausted, Azula fell onto the stone floor and ground her teeth together, fighting the urge to vomit. If she didn't hurry, she would black out. The plan would be ruined. She took ten minutes to calm her mind and body, but the air was so heavy with blood she couldn't breathe right. She needed to get out.

The hallway just outside her cell would be empty, but she didn't know the layout of the institution or where she was geographically. Her time was limited, her sick body fighting against her. With as much effort as she could find, she picked herself up and ran.

The ward was empty. It was seven in the morning and most people were still riding the ferries to the island, which Azula quickly took in once she found a window. An island. Great. She watched the sea festering beneath a cloudy, grey sky, just daring a storm to hit and provoke it. The ferries were still a long range from the docks, but Azula couldn't be sure of it. She'd have to hide somewhere on the island.

She held her head for a few minutes, trying to stop the miserable nausea. It didn't work. She threw up the rest of her breakfast onto the floor and then continued walking down the hall. The institution was nice but old, a replica of her father's Fire Nation ideology, and after a while Azula realized she'd been there before. She remembered the red ceilings, the wood floors. The layout of the building slowly refilled the cloudy regions of her brain, highlighting doorways, entrances, exits. The irony of it all was that she had interrogated patients here. She had probably tortured them.

Just as Azula was about to make a turn, she glanced out the window one more time. She froze as a ferry pulled in.

A royal ship.

Zuko's ship.

A small bead of panic broke through her body as she saw Zuko leave the iron-clad military machine, but there was something wrong about him. The panic faded into mild amusement as Azula saw Zuko was dressed in his sleeping clothes; he had also come alone. No soldiers followed him as the Fire Nation's king ran down the docks and passed the few doctors waiting there to greet him. Anger played across his face in the same way amusement sat on Azula's, and soon he disappeared into the front of the institution. He was clearly there to see her. Oh well.

Judging off her depth perception, she decided her location was the third, maybe fourth floor. It was all she could find out before she heard frantic footsteps climbing up the staircase just beneath her, belonging to Zuko, the doctors, the uninformed staff. Zuko was truly the bane of her existence, but she could not fight him, she couldn't fight anyone right now. Her body retched forward, and it was the most she could do to get out onto the balcony hanging above the ocean. The coolness of the outside air was a shock to her system; she had not been outside for nearly half a year. She leaned over the railing.

Somewhere behind her Zuko called her name. She couldn't tell if he was angry or horrified.

"Azula!" Zuko yelled again, rushing forward to grab Azula's ailing body.

Azula turned around, only to lose feeling in her legs. She collapsed forward into Zuko's body, and it soon became a fight of flailing arms and legs. Bodies shoved back and forth, horrified, disgusted. Completely repulsed by their touching forms, Azula tried to push away, shoving her arms into Zuko's chest and upward into his chin and throat, creating a growing distance between their bodies. Zuko, who up to this point had never even halfway embraced his sister, wasn't sure if she was attacking him or not and fought the urge to back away and run.

What Azula didn't know was that Zuko's intentions were more good than bad. He knew about Tseng, about the clover. He had been informed at four in the morning by a rogue doctor, and in a conflicted sense of right and wrong, he rushed from the palace without a word to anyone. He hated Azula, but he could not let his sister's body become a literal site for experiments.

"Azula, listen to me—" he tried to explain, but it only ended in useless shouting. Above anyone, Zuko knew Azula was not crazy. He sent her there for treatment, not for this—

On the other side, Azula thought the world was a tornado. She couldn't find a steady place to focus on, and her fever had grown so high she was starting to lose consciousness.

"_Zuko_," Azula sneered, disoriented, trying to find her legs again to take back her body.

Zuko struggled against her in return. He could feel Azula's boiling skin, see the sweat pouring down her brow. "Stop—Azula—" He tried to reason, but it was a fight for him not to strike her jaw and knock her out. She had never listened to him before.

It was too late. Azula, in a desperate attempt to get away, go anywhere, shoved her body backwards, throwing herself over the railing. Zuko, off balance and still clinging to Azula, went with her, their bodies spiraling toward the dark, storm-bound ocean.

The last thing Azula remembered was feeling the cold water against her body.

She closed her eyes, and for the life of her, could not get them back open.

-

-

-

**A/N**: I adore Azula. She was my favorite character throughout the show, and I loved her ending. My hat off to Brian and Mike for not giving her a solid ending, but leaving it open to interpretation. So, here's mine.

Sorry this chapter was more event-descriptive than an exploration of thoughts, but that will come late. Chapter 2 anyone?

Review?


End file.
